The family of imprisoned Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos was the victim of an attempted hit on their lives this month, as the agent's wife says someone broke into their home and filled it with gas, trashing photographs and pummeling their dog.

Can Sutton explain where he was at the time? He'd be my first suspect ~ and if we can get an investigation going this time next week he'll be unemployed, out of a job, no prospects with a big lawfirm, and a big mortgage payment to meet.

Perhaps a gift from one of those honest, hard working folks here to do the jobs Americans won’t do. Jorge’s administration has been a real Godsend for these two families, huh? Bush has done some good things and some bad, like most presidents. But placing and keeping these men in prison...destroying their families, this act alone makes him an even bigger BUM than Clinton or Carter. It is beyond inexcuseable.

6
posted on 01/15/2009 8:42:25 AM PST
by Oldpuppymax
(AGENDA OF THE LEFT EXPOSED)

No doubt that there was something other than a robbery done on the home. The El Paso area is quite poor, and there are a lot of burglaries...few will take the time to “turn on the gas” in a home in a burglary spree....there are too many other places to hit

Jorge Boosh’s refusal to pardon Ramos and Compean is an outright travesty. Only the most brain-dead liberal GOPer still supports Boosh.

All this to pander to illegal aliens....what an anti-American tragedy

12
posted on 01/15/2009 8:54:09 AM PST
by UCFRoadWarrior
(The US Chamber of Commerce is really the Anti-American Collective of Communists)

President Bush believes his Christianity and his friends mix. His biggest shortcoming is his belief in his friends. He believed Rumsfeld who told him to continue the course in Iraq (Surge, we don’t need no stinking surge!) and he believed those who told him that Ramos and Compean were guilty.

President Bush will burn in hell, mainly because of what he has allowed to happen to these two men.

The conspiratorial blindness that could lead a supposedly sentient being to suspect that a sitting, well-respected U.S. Attorney trashed somebody’s house is indicative of the derangement of some of the pro-CR folks here.

The fact that none of the pro-CR folks will even suggest your theory is nuts is indicative of the level of discourse expected.

I agree with your sentiments up to “George Bush will burn in hell”. You don’t know that, it’s not your place, and to pretend that you do puts your soul in grave danger.

I mean, there are lots of people that we all of us get insanely angry with, but having heard about the visions that some saints have been priveledged to have of hell, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. That’s right, no one, ever. Hell is real, hell is forever, and hell is, well, hell.

Look, CW, we all know Sutton took the "possession of a gun in commission of a crime" statute and stretched it beyond all reason just so he had a long enough sentence to convince DOJ to give him the money for the prosecution.

That's why I treat anything to do with Sutton as though Sutton is a worthless drifter who somehow came into knowledge of a con that he's been using on everybody ~ or, alternatively that Sutton is a mad man.

Hey, Sutton isn't out of a job yet either is he. Did you read my facetious post throughly and run it through your noggin a few times to see where this is headed.

In fact, a really clever Freeper would see that I used Sutton's logic to come up with 11 and 12 year terms to come up with the idea that he, Sutton, would be breaking into homes, so we might as well blame him for this one.

BTW, Chuckee, Sutton is not at all "well respected" ~ you'll see once he's out of office. At the moment he can command respect because he's shown himself to be kind of a loose cannon ready to toss people into prison on questionable charges.

I didn’t know we carried that much waste around with us. I guess that would be a useful thing for someone who had to lose weight quickly.

As for the article, the entire article is based on what the family told the reporter. It says the house was broken into while they were visiting her husband in prison. It says she thinks the gas was on for two days. It doesn’t say how long they were off visiting, it doesn’t say how she knows when the break-in happened, it doesn’t say if anybody was taking care of the dog, or whether the dog was inside or outside.

CW, the "experts" are amatuers at interpreting just how far you can stretch a law or a federal regulation. I'm sure that given 5 minutes thought on the matter I could have Sutton's entire office prosecuted for having caused Ramos and Campeon to have had guns on the job, right there at hand, to shoot dope dealers.

You see what the problem is, Sutton had to have a case worth pursuing ~ 10 years for example ~ and he didn't, so he found a bunch of ignorant Western hillbillies to buy into this idea. And they did.

I suppose you could live life assuming that we filled our district and appeals courts with amateurs ignorant of the law or it’s application.

I’ve certainly had judgments of the supreme court that I have disagreed with, so I’m not much for respecting authority for authority’s sake.

But I’m pretty sure I don’t want police to be allowed to use their weapons to commit crimes simply because they were given the weapons to protect us.

Which means that if the police are convicted of committing a crime, and they use their weapons to do so, I would expect they would be subject to the same laws I would be subjected to if I used my gun while committing a crime.

Alas, you miss the whole point. The way the law is written it's not just the perp, but the perp's cappos, and the cappo di tutti cappo who can be charged with responsibility for the weapon's presence.

There are cases aplenty where the prosecutors have reached out and grabbed such folks ~

If you wanted to include cops in the net you should have written the law to do that, else you also write in the entire chain of command, and that includes, as it turns out, the President, the Secretary, the appropriate Under Secretary, etc., etc., etc. ~ the cappos. It's quite obvious Congress never intended such a thing ~ no President, no Secretary, no border patrolman.

You have a bad law stretched beyond its limits to do improper selective prosecutions.

That's why Sutton needed a bunch of bills to do the job. He'd never gotten away with it in DC.

And yes, I do believe we tend to man the Justice Department with yahoos and assholes. I had a perfectly good finding that a well known NGO owed the government over $10 million. The DOJ lawyers wanted to knock that down to 10%.

Typical DOJ lawyer.

He was overridden and they ended up going for the whole thing. Our own agency lawyers were chagrined ~ they knew that I'd always look down at them and other government lawyers the rest of their careers, and I do.

Note, the not counting the bullets crime, which is the only one Sutton could prove without the testimony of a Mexican dope runner, doesn't carry an 11 or 12 year penalty ~ 6 months tops depending on circumstances, and usually just a letter to the personnel file.

DOJ simply does not fund prosecutions that send a cup to stir for 6 months for paperwork errors.

It does, OTOH, fund prosecuting them for 10 years.

Sutton needed the gun thing interpreted by an aggressive careerist female (as I understood it) so he could get the prosecution funded.

We cannot help but notice that the two guys were Mexican Americans, and I would imagine you can get them prosecuted day and night out there in that part of the country ~ the locals don't differentiat between Mexican cops and Mexican criminals, American citizenship or not.

Maybe Sutton imagined "W" would promote him ~ that'd be useful 4 or 8 years from now.

Guy ruined his future career in Conservative or Republican politics. He'll have to become a Leftwingtard now.

The law deals with people who were in on the crime, not the people who provided the weapons, if the weapons were provided legally.

You’d have the same issue with a security guard using his weapon to go off and commit other crimes.

Now, I think it is quite a stretch to charge a gun crime when the police officers were on duty, performing an official act sanctioned by authority, even if during that duty they break the law.

But that is a different distinction than you seem to be making, because if I understand your argument you don’t think any police officer should face this law if they use their officially issued weapon in a crime.

In addition, while I personally think it is wrong to use this particular law against police who use their gun during their official duties (even if they commit a crime in those duties), I don’t think it is a violation of what the law says to do so.

But that “I don’t think” is not based on how I believe the law should be used, but on the fact that the judge in the case, and the judges of the appeals court, both ruled that the law could be applied to this case.

And since those judges know a lot more about the law than I do, they probably are right. At least, it is clear that smart people with a clear knowledge of law in this country believe the law was correctly applied, so it can’t be the case that Sutton went well beyond reason in using the law.

Smart people who know what they are doing disagree with your position. It doesn’t mean your position is wrong, but it does mean you are wrong to suggest that the use of the law can’t be rationally justified.

I would also note that congress, which passed the law, expressed no majority opinion that the law was being applied incorrectly, nor did they take any action to clarify the law.

And it’s not like they didn’t have a chance — there were hearings about the case, and there were representatives pushing to take a vote on it. It seems clear that a majority of congress either agrees with this use of the law, or at least doesn’t care that the law is being used this way.

I also am not a fan of mandatory sentences. I know that we have a lot of bad judges, and we should focus on hiring competent people to be judges. But once we have put competent people in place, we should give them some discretion to handle cases individually when there are extenuating circumstances, subject to legal review.

There’s no way a bunch of politicians are going to write the perfect law, but mandatory sentences suggest the law and the punishment are exact and perfect and should not in any way be tampered with.

There are multiple ways to attack the problem. One is to point out that the officers didn't voluntarily take guns to the scene of their crime(s) (if any). They were told to do so by higher authority extending all the way up to the President.

In Virginia being an accessory to a crime gets you the same time. I'm sure you could pursue the same course in bringing federal charges against, for example, "crime lords", "gang chieftains", and "the President" ~

Still, the cops here didn't take their guns to work that day with the intention of commiting a crime. Someone else directed them to take those guns to work that day for the purpose of self-protection as well as shooting uppity drug dealers and other criminals.

So far nothing happened regarding the "intention" issue in that case.

The only "crime" Sutton could pin them with was administrative in nature and had a penalty of less than a year. He was actually trying to prosecute them for not counting their bullets.

Obviously Sutton is a mad man, but we digress.

You cannot link "intent" to the use of the gun with respect to the subsequent "crime" of not counting shell casings.

Does not happen except in hillbilly courts where the city slicker comes in and rubs the judge's inner thing and whispers "You know I'm one of George's buddies, ya hear".

The fact the guys were police officers who were required to be armed is sufficient to blow the "ten years" part right out of court in any real court. So I have to agree with you on that.

Now, back to the 6 months max for not counting shell casings, I don't think that one's been enforced since WWI.

Again, I have no information on that issue, but I would bet that if you actually went to where he lives, and asked around, that Sutton and his family are solid, his church is solid, his friends are solid, and that he is quite unaware that you and all of your friends hate him so much.

People here agitated to have the dope dealer picked up and prosecuted for a later crime

Actually, most of the people here agitated for the dope dealer to be arrested and charged for the first drug-smuggling incident.

Unfortunately, the two agents who were supposed to catch him let him escape, and then couldn't identify him in a lineup or provide enough information to put the man at the scene. Of course, telling that they had shot the man would have made it much easier to identify him, but once they hid that information there was no way it could be used against the man in court later.

Eventually, Sutton was able to get Davila on a different charge, and now the guy is in jail where he belongs. And he never got a dime of money for any "lawsuit" that was threatened, just treatment for his injuries from the shooting that the agents didn't report.

Sutton had every right to be pissed at the agents. He learned about a shooting from the guy who was SHOT, rather than from the chain of command.

I can't imagine Sutton was trying to make a deal to do talk radio. I guess you mean he went on some of the anti-Sutton shoes to try to explain his position, and was unable to do so. If you think a man's life is defined by how he does on a talk show, then maybe you are correct.

My point about the shooting in this thread was that if they had reported the shooting, then finding the man with the agent’s bullet in him would have been strong physical evidence linking the man to the crime scene.

But since they didn’t report it, trying to use it at trial would be fruitless. Ramos would be on the witness stand testifying that they shot the guy, and the defense would tear him apart about the failure to report the shooting, and noting that Ramos could have shot the guy anywhere at any time, since there was no record of the shooting.

Remember, the only reason we know Davila was at the scene that day is because Davila testified that he was there. Neither Ramos nor Compean could identify him, they didn’t find any conclusive prints on the van, and they didn’t aprehend him there.

So there was no way we’d ever prosecute him for the drug smuggling — the bullet is the only physical evidence we had tying him to the scene, and that only works if you know he was shot at the scene.

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